A recent article by HBR reviewed the finding that todays leaders are “increasingly self-centered, overconfident, and deluded. So why is it that we keep hiring narcissistic CEOs?
In previous research, I have found that much of this comes down to faulty hiring assessments carried out by Board members. The Board is generally looking for confident, outspoken, strong and decisive attributes and smart CEOs know how to play up to this need. The very same Boards are scratching their heads two years later wondering why their superstar CEO has failed to perform and employee satisfaction is down, and attrition of top performers is up.
Narcissistic personalities are very adept at ‘impressing’ those who can deliver what they want, and destroying those by any means, those who stand in their way. They lack self-awareness, self mastery, social awareness and only employ social mastery insofar as it meets their personal needs. In short, they lack emotional intelligence [EQ].
Todays Boards have failed to evolve their hiring practices, and assessment criteria to account for the need for more authentic, relationship oriented leaders, with higher EQ and cross-cultural leadership skills.
The article talks about ‘the dark side’ of leadership and questions how it will evolve or devolve over the coming years.
Many leadership textbooks still proclaim the ‘ideal leader’ to be one who quite frankly sounds like a self-important megalomaniac. With CEO personalities playing a significant role in shaping the culture of their organisations, those whose higher aim is to create a celebrity CEO brand may gain notice in the shorter term, but will fail in the longer term. Unfortunately, they take a lot of great people, and companies down with them.
Leadership is changing — fast.
Good leaders know how to manage the tension between individual self interest and pro-social motivation that leads to higher performance. Our brain has a natural affinity to seek out those ‘like us’. However, this attribute has also failed to evolve from the caveman era, where competing tribes were a mortal threat leading to great distrust amongst unfamiliar faces. Today, with multi-cultural teams, and personalities, leaders need to be more self aware of their natural biases, and how these impact their decisions.
Narcissistic CEOs have trouble separating out their own egos from the ‘good of the company’. This can manifest in overpaying for companies they acquire, taking higher risks resulting in greater volatility, swinging from big wins to even bigger losses, and are more prone to counterproductive work behaviours, such as fraud and abuse of power.
The message is clear – the criteria used to evaluate and select leaders must more than evolve, it must rapidly transform to catch up to what companies need from their leaders today.
How would you rank our top 10 attributes for CEO’s today?
